Ambrosiac musings of a food maniac

These gnocchi are awesome; the bright pink from the beet and the bright green from the chard-ricotta sauce is quite the eye candy and the taste is just amazing. The beets don't dominate the gnocchi, they just add a hint of beetiness.

Thanks to our friend Yael for providing the basic gnocchi recipe that she brought home from her stay in Italy.

Last January Keren and myself celebrated my birthday at the 'Salon' restuarant in Tel Aviv, one of the most applauded restuarants in Israel. Lots has been written about Mr. Shani and his restaurant and by greater writers than yours truly, so I will leave the superlatives to them.

Risotto is probably the king of Italian cooking for me. Its texture when done right is amazingly soft while not being too heavy and allowing you to enjoy a myriad of different tastes - the rice, the stalk, the cheese, the vegetables, the wine...

I love ganache domes. Quite like truffles (or like the Italian variant, Tartufo Nero) but softer due to the higher cream to chocolate ratio. I like to use 70% cocoa solids Guanaja chocolate from Valrhona but any good chocolate works.

Usually I add some whisky (15 year old Dalwhinnie works great), orange liquer or espresso, but this time I wanted something different, and balsamic vinegar seemed like an interesting choice. I was pleased to discover how well it works together with the ganache!

Invented when I had to find use for leftover celeriac and chard leaves, this turned out to be a tremendously delicious dish. This ragù is excellent as a pasta sauce or served on top of plain white rice or mashed potatoes.

I've been using a lot of sweet potatoes and pumpkin lately, as my CSA provider keeps sending me them week after week. This forces me to try creative ideas (or at least, more creative than the usual ingredients I use), and this week's dish is one outcome of this. The ravioli filling is simple but really delicious and can probably stand on its own as a spread or pasta sauce.

This ragù is based on the traditional Bolognese ragù but replaces half of the beef with lamb. Note that the meat is roughly chopped rather than minced, this gives the sauce a more 'meaty' texture. The use of sage as the sole herb compliments the lamb's aroma.

A surprisingly delicious dish which will also work well with fresh pasta such as Fettuccine or Tagliatelle. I never thought that pumpkin would taste so good to me :)

I first made this sauce when I had some very ripe grape tomatoes (a plum-shaped variant of cherry tomato) left over. I sliced a few of them, threw in the wok with some garlic, chili peppers and rosemary and then found out I was out of red wine, so I used some balsamic vinegar instead. The sauce was surprisingly delicious and I earned a new recipe.

You can use regular tomatoes instead of cherry tomatoes, but try to pick the smallest, ripest tomatoes you can find. If using regular tomatoes, cut each tomato to 4 or 8 pieces, according to their size.

This marinade makes for an especially tender and delicious dish. The chicken thighs are also suitable for cooking as whole steaks on a BBQ.

The easiest way to make this marinade is to throw all solid ingredients with a little olive oil into a food processor and run it for a few minutes, until everything's chopped. This way, you don't even have to peel the garlic cloves - the BBQ fire will burn them anyway.